Still, am confident that once I arrive in the Gobi there will be nothing on my mind except completing the race and doing myself and those who believe in me proud. As a matter of fact, I can’t wait to start running and have a quiet positive expectancy of this brand new experience.

As was the case in the Sahara, am looking forward to receiving messages of love and support. I find that they are a tremendous source of nourishment for the soul and would love for you to make a little space in your day and heart to send me some positive words.

You can do so by going to www.4deserts.com/gobimarch and selecting email a competitor from the Race Coverage drop-down list. Names are arranged according to surnames, so look for Lawrence Thaddeus

Thank you much from my heart.

This fellowship manifests itself in many ways: someone waiting for you at the end of a stage to help carry your pack to the tent; or checking in on you during the evenings or early mornings; or hanging back to walk with you when you are struggling. This was service leadership at its best.

Even though we are all grappling with our own personal predicaments, we somehow discover that little extra to give someone else a shot in the arm. It’s so much easier to get outside yourself when you’re thinking about someone else. This is the best way to overcome challenges and difficulty: focus outwards.

For being there, we are already winners – we go on to run not so much to beat one another, but to be with one another. The joy of participating in such an event is the joy of adding our power and personality to the pack. And many extend their reach and influence to their wider community by raising funds for assorted charities.

As the official post-race update articulated, “The bonds made…are strong and all those who have taken part in this event are now part of a much wider family, one dedicated to seeing the world through different eyes and finding out what it truly means to be a member of the human race.”

You cannot not make a difference.

A life worth living is a life of passion in the pursuit of our dreams; it is about what excites our spirit and our energy. When we’re doing the thing that we love and that we’re good at, time takes on a different dimension completely. If we’re doing something we love, we come alive and an entire day simply flies by. Avid runners think nothing of popping out the door for a long run, while others dread just lacing up their shoes. If we’re doing something that doesn’t resonate with our spirit, five minutes feels like forever. The reason so many people go through life like zombies is because it doesn’t feed their spirit; it doesn’t feed their energy or their passion.

In the struggle between practicality and passion, many choose the former. They give up their passion and dreams in order to do a job they don’t feel anything for, so they can earn money and keep up with the Joneses. The alternative is to pay the price of sacrifice, perseverance, hard work and even rejection, in order to pursue our passion and do the job we love, and in the process earn money and create meaning in our lives.

What is your dream?

He called courage the power to let go of the familiar. To be courageous is to let go of familiar ideas and comfortable assumptions. An example is our set attitude toward age. In my formal talks and informal conversations on the Sahara Race, I invariably get responses along the lines of “I wish I could do something like this, but I’m too old.” And these are people in their 30’s and 40’s! Somehow it has been drilled into our consciousness that sporting pursuits are the domain of those in their teens and 20’s.

Running down the list of participants of any of the 4 Deserts races, it is clear that participants run the gamut from young to old. The oldest in the Sahara Race was Jack Denness, who at 74 years young, was a school caretaker in England. And this year he will be competing in the Badwater ultramarathon. Who says old people are of no use and should simply rest up and wait to die? Who says the youths of today can’t contribute and make a difference? Who says if you come from a certain school or socio economic background, that you should expect only this much from life and that you will end up at a certain point? Or that you will be this sort of person?

All too often we are too obsessed with how our labelling according to our schools, qualifications, colour, age etc, brands us for life. And so we are told and we believe, that it starts at a certain point and we go through a particular path and if we follow it, we will end up set for the rest of our life. But it doesn’t.

Roger Bannister. Gong Baoren. Cliff Young. Richard Branson. Barack Obama. Helen Keller. Ray Charles. Andrea Bocelli. Rosa Parks. Marie Curie. These are a random sprinkling of personalities, familiar and not so familiar, who had to courage to let go of familiar assumptions and perceived disadvantages to achieve greatness and make a difference.

Courage is the power to abandon our narrow way of thinking and with courage comes the curiosity and hunger to learn. With courage comes freedom for new ideas and new creations. With courage we break new ground, get better and become a better person.

What would it take for you to let go?

This was a workshop with a difference. Different because this was a group of special individuals. Coming from a variety of backgrounds, schools and sporting history, they were united by a common aspiration, a dream to do their utmost best and do their country and themselves proud. And it told.

From the word go, their maturity, discipline and camaraderie stood out. Perhaps juggling school life with a punishing training regime over the last several months has imbued in them an appreciation for precious time with one another. Or maybe their exposure to regional and international competition arenas has raised their confidence levels. Quite possibly the rigour of pursuing sporting excellence and making sacrifices has inculcated a respect for achievement.

Their willingness to participate, to explore, to go deep and above all, to be real was greatly moving and at the end of the workshop I felt that it was I who had learnt the most.

Champs, if you are reading this, I thank you for revealing who you really are, for teaching me the value of humility and authenticity. And for showing me what it means to make your dreams come alive. In my eyes you are champions and I dedicate this weekend’s ultra marathon to you all.

On the professional front I secured a role with a consultancy firm involved in organisational development work for a global oil and gas giant and recently I earned a position to provide coaching and facilitation services for the military. Both of these developments have skyrocketed my learning and work on the corporate fronts to a whole new level. Plus I will be sitting on the panel of a prestigious forum in June which will be opened by the Prime Minister.

Personally, I have cemented a deeper level of understanding and intimacy with my significant other and stepped up my preparations for my next ultra endurance footrace that is the Gobi March. Looking forward to the Antarctica challenge in November, I have hooked up with an old school friend who owns a successful chain of pet food and retailing businesses in the region and we are at an advanced stage of talks to fundraise for a local charity.

So why am I so tired and drained?

A big part of it is that I haven’t stopped to take stock of my achievements.  While I register them as significant milestones on an intellectual level, I haven’t yet taken the time to fully celebrate my growth and development and congratulate myself on my results. On the contrary, I had made mental notes and then immediately looked forward to the next thing to conquer.

To tell myself that I have done a good job is one part of it; to really feel the sense of accomplishment and delight is the other. It is perfectly fine and necessary to just stop and marvel and simply….do nothing. That is to say, completely get off the treadmill of life and take a break, relax and be completely ok with it. This is because I know I am not resting on my laurels but taking a breather to soak it all in and gather strength and move forward again.

To use my training for the Gobi March as a metaphor, I am feeling the effects of overtraining and being too fixated on my goal. It is time to take my foot off the pedal for a little while and allow my body to recuperate and muscles to grow.

Breathe in…breathe out….

It has been over half a year since I started training with a HRT and I am beginning to get used to it as a running companion and guide. It wasn’t always this way. My earlier experiences with it were frustrating and maddening – the vast array of data and beeping alarms proving to be so bewildering that running with it seemed to hamper, rather than help, my performance training. 

According to the MEP calculations, my set heart rate zone allows for only a ten beat differential within the top and bottom limits. Exceeding either of these limits triggers a beeping alarm to remind me to either slow down or hasten my pace. This frequently led to situations where I either slowed down or sped up too much such that my heart rate crossed the other limit. It was a constant struggle just trying to maintain a consistent pace.

But the beeping – and silence – simply acts as a feedback mechanism. It is an audible reminder that what I am doing is not working and that I need to make some adjustments to my pacing or breathing or technique. This feedback mechanism gives me information and I am free to do whatever I want with it – to change something or ignore it or allow myself to get riled up. 

It is the same way in life. We are constantly receiving information from people around us – our child refuses to listen to us; our spouse gets annoyed with us; a client relationship breaks down; a colleague gives less than 100 percent to a team task; a subordinate performs the same task poorly an umpteenth time…

These symptoms are reminders that something is not quite right, that something different need to be done and we can be the one to make that adjustment. We can choose to use this information to satisfy our desired outcome or pretend it is not there or slip into victim mode and blame the other party. The choice is ours.

Learn to use all this external noise and feedback to help us grow. Just like I learnt to value the beeping from my HRT to enhance my running performance, so too we can value the constant feedback in our lives to better our quality of living.

Insanity is to do the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result – Albert Einstein

Every single detail of my body structure, and hence the suit, is important. These include my arm position and the way I stand, as well as the position of the buttons, the pocket levels and size and width of the lapel. A bespoke tailor in the traditional mould, tailoring is a meticulous art to him, just like architecture. His painstaking attention to the subtle details on a suit is seen in his precision with every stitch and every measurement.

What about our relationships? What if we paid half as much attention to the quality of our conversations and interactions with our loved ones? What would our relationships with our parents, our children, our spouses, our colleagues and our friends be like?

To begin, I will practise 3 things.

Firstly, be fully present in each conversation. That means no watching tv or web surfing or thinking about something else at the same time. This robs the other person of what I have to offer. Give the other person my full attention and energy, and hence, my respect.

Secondly, make it safe. When safety is at risk, people adopt a flight or fight response. This shows up in silent fuming, masking of emotions, aggressive confrontations and blaming conversations. Make it safe for the other person to talk about almost anything and build an intimate relationship.

Thirdly, leave the other person better off. Even after a crucial dialogue or relationship has broken down, fully experience my experience. Manage my emotions, turn to others for support and then return to get some form of closure.

After all, a ruined suit can be thrown away but a ruined relationship will forever burn in our hearts.

Communication. It is a big word and I shall draw on one very common aspect of it with an extract from “Crucial Conversations”…

When faced with a failed conversation, most of us are quick to blame others. If others would only change, then we’d all live happily ever after…He/she started it. It’s his/her fault, not mine.

When conversations reach a crucial point, many of us quickly change our original objectives to a much less healthy goal: being right. We do this by blaming the other party: “why are you…?”, “you are so…” and “you see! You…”

Many often take it to the extreme with dangerous and negative phrases that start with “you always…” and “you never…” Our self preservation DNA simply does not allow us to stand up to such attacks and it is not surprising that nothing shuts down communications faster than either of those two words.

So what do we do when there is a dialogue breakdown?

Firstly, avoid exaggerated, evaluative or extreme statements toward the other party. Expressions like “always,” “never,” and “every time” will usually just lead to irrelevant discussions related to the use of those words. Those sentences have the exact opposite intent that you want and only makes you a worse communicator.

Secondly, recognise that it is a shared problem. Since the issue is upsetting you, it is your problem (no matter what your partner did that you think caused it in the first place). If you begin by asking or stating what you can do differently or more/less of to help solve the problem before asking your partner to change, you may induce a collaborative situation which is matched by your partner.

Lastly, stop pointing the finger. Masters of communication recognise that more often than not, we do something to contribute to the problems we are experiencing and these masters turn it into the principle “Work on myself first”. As much as others may need to change or we may want them to change, the only person we can continually inspire or change is the person in the mirror.

You never truly love someone until the mere thought of hurting that person is enough to break your own heart.

Based on informal discussions and chats with many others, hers seems to be a fair reflection of the perspective of wider society. Without going into whether that is a right or wrong, or good or bad view, it is clear that in the interconnected spheres of tight friendships, close family kinships, loving intimate relationships and high performing corporate networks, trust is a significant difference maker.  

According to the Dean of a management education institute whom I recently interviewed as part of a consultancy project on the global corporate team player, once trust is lost it is enormously difficult to bring it back. Certainly cheated spouses and bamboozled businessmen the world over can bear testament to that sentiment.

A fair question to ask is “how does one build and maintain trust in any relationship or partnership?” but I think people do already know how to do that. Perhaps a better question is when to build and maintain trust? 

Are you demonstrating trust in every memo and email exchange? In every question asked and every instruction issued? In your assumptions and evaluation of others? In the way you look at your partner and/or colleague? In the way you interact with others? 

Building trust is like learning how to walk or talk or eat or write. We became masters of daily acts by doing them over and over again, by continually practising them, by constantly using those techniques and by being conscious of performing them.

It takes not just an isolated action or an occasional deed but a consistent and habitual set of behaviours to establish and nurture that all-important ingredient. In other words, trust needs to be lived.